


ghosts

by KathrynShadow



Category: DC Extended Universe
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Kanes can't communicate and this is canon, Kate's very gay for Diana but that is technically not the focus, Lesbian Disaster, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-20 14:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19993861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: "You're sloppy," the first Bat says to her, his voice distorted, scraped through a changer.Kate says nothing.





	ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Panny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Panny/gifts).



**_then._ **

**COPY-BAT?** **  
** **Possible second vigilante spotted near Port Adams**

The newspaper thuds down onto the concrete. It's not exactly a front-page headline, easily shoved out of that spot by the Nighthawks' (surprising) win against the Metropolis whatever-the-fucks, a (downright shocking) instance of a mobster  _ not _ "mysteriously" escaping GCPD custody, and a (painfully predictable) fatal accident at Ace Chemicals. But it is, technically, a headline.

Two figures stare at each other in silence over it. One of them is taller than the other one, covered head to toe in matte charcoal body armor, only the pale shape of his lower jaw and the flat black sigil on his chest breaking up the color scheme. He's built like a brick wall and looks about as inviting.

Kate doesn't have the Bat's resources. Her armor is a basic ballistic vest that she's wearing over the rest of her suit: functional, but not as all-encompassing as she wants. She doesn't have a cowl, either; she couldn't make one work, found it suffocating to try. (Maybe one day it won't remind her of a burlap sack over her head, fear and blood and gunpowder. Maybe one day she'll even shock what's left of her family and get therapy.) She wears a mask instead, carefully molded to the shape of her face, concealing everything from below her cheekbones to above her hairline. There's no way that anyone could mistake her for him up close, so she hasn't bothered to do much to pretend otherwise; her hair is braided tight to her skull to avoid a possible handhold in a fight, not to bring their silhouettes a little more in line.

She looks like what she is. It doesn't surprise her that she doesn't wholly like it—but she does like it more than most of the alternatives.

"You're sloppy," the first Bat says to her, his voice distorted, scraped through a changer.

Kate says nothing.

His mouth thins. "I know who you are," he says. "And I know why you're here."

She doesn't doubt it any more than she doubts that she knows who he is. She may have been dancing on the edge of a blackout the first time she saw him like this, but she’d know him anywhere. Same height, same build, same set to his mouth. Most damningly of all: Batman didn’t slow down to make sure an alcoholic wasn’t too drunk for her krav maga to save her. Not unless that alcoholic gave him a damn good reason to.

(A whole bench at the memorial left empty but for him. He was older than her, but not by enough to matter; and besides, even if he’d lost his parents, he hadn’t lost everything. Someone needed to show him that.

He was family. And he was family four years later, when he came up to her at her mother’s and Beth’s funeral and returned the favor. And then—and then she went into the Army, and he vanished, and somewhere along the line they ended up like this.)

But she still doesn't speak, just on that tiny off-chance that he's bluffing and the sound of her unfiltered voice will jog his memory.

He doesn't seem to feel like proving it. "Go home," he says, walking forward. "I don't need your kind of help." Kate isn't about to just step aside for him, so he brushes past instead before firing a grappling hook across the street and whizzing out of sight.

It takes her a few seconds to notice that the gun is missing from her belt, and by that point he's long gone.

* * *

**_now._ **

Kate knocks on the doorframe as she steps over the threshold, enormous thermos cradled against her chest. It was probably terrible manners, but she'd been in and out of Wayne Manor so often as a child that it's difficult not to think of it as an extension of her own territory.

Also, that particular entrance was a burned-out husk that didn't even have a door in it anymore.

No one answers at first, so she wanders farther into the shell of a building, peering around corners, skirting around the edges of areas that look too collapsible to walk through. It looks like Bruce has at least started to patch the place up again; there's some scaffolding that's definitely new, a tarp stretched over a gaping hole in the wall. Some of it looks like it's actually been here for at least a few months, and Kate wonders—with a slight stab of guilt—how long it's been since her cousin started to dig himself out of the hole he's been in.

Kate turns a corner and finally finds signs of life. To be slightly more accurate, she sees Wonder Woman—she's not in her regalia, she's dressed more like she's just gotten home from an interview than anything else, but she's also maneuvering a chunk of masonry twice her size out of a stairwell without apparent effort. It can't possibly be anyone else.

She's an adult. She is an adult woman who knows how to function around other adult women, even when the circumstances are a little strange. Kate knocks again, a quiet rap of knuckles on weathered paint. "Hey," she says.

The Amazon looks up, a smile beginning to spread over her face even before her eyes focus on the newcomer in the room. Kate's absolutely sure that it's just one of those automatic, polite smiles—there's no reason for it to be anything else—but it still looks pretty damned genuine. "Hello," she says, and there's a question in her voice but no awkwardness. She guides the chunk of building to rest against the wall and straightens up to her full height as if she hadn't been interrupted at all.

Maybe Kate's just spent too much time around Bruce, but if  _ she _ were accidentally putting her superpowers on display in front of a stranger in her civvies, she'd be a little less calm. But then, she's human. Maybe it's different when you're practically bulletproof.

(Or maybe Wonder Woman just knows that the default human response is to just pretend that nothing happened, and she knows that there's no need to worry.)

"I was looking for—" Kate begins, but Bruce emerges from the top of the stairs before she can finish. "Bruce," she says. Her mouth tries to smile but she's just not sure how to do it. He looks... good. He's a little haggard, his eyes are tired, but he looks almost healthy. "Alfred said you'd be here. He didn't mention you had company." She checks the lid of the thermos and tosses it up at him.

Bruce catches it one-handed and jogs down the stairs, apparently unbothered by the debris still littering half of every step. “Kate,” he says, like he can’t quite believe she’s here. (He probably can’t.) “It was a little spur of the moment. Diana, this is Kate,” he adds, glancing back at the Amazon. “My cousin. Kate, this is Diana.”

Diana raises an eyebrow at him, but then turns her smile back on Kate, taking a step closer. “A pleasure,” she says, and actually makes it sound genuine.

Kate walks forward enough to shake Diana’s hand when it’s offered. Her grip is firm, but not even slightly uncomfortable; some crazy part of Kate wants to wonder if she didn’t imagine the thing with the wall, just because there’s no evidence of it here. “Likewise,” she says.

God, she’s tall.

“She’s a demigoddess,” Bruce says, a horrible glint in his eyes, leaning his forearms on the truncated bannister.

Diana laughs. “Bruce, please,” she says, but noticeably doesn’t contradict him. Which honestly wouldn’t have made Kate wonder about a damned thing if the last couple of years hadn’t been so weird.

Kate clears her throat and resolutely ignores that. “Doing some remodeling?” she asks mildly, glancing around the room. This one didn’t get hit by the fire too badly; all of the damage looks suspiciously like there was a very brief, violent fight with at least one person who was  _ far  _ too strong.

Bruce sucks in a breath, straightening up and looking to the ceiling. “Yeah,” he says. “I think it’s time.” He looks at her like he’s waiting for something, like he wants to ask something but is afraid of the answer.

Kate doesn’t think about anything. “I can stick around if you want me to,” she says. “I’m no demigoddess but I can still make myself useful.”

Diana chuckles to herself. Bruce smiles with his eyes before it touches his mouth, and something clicks softly into place.

* * *

**_then._ **

This was a mistake.

Kate spits out blood, pushing herself to her feet through the ringing in her head. Her fingers itch for a gun that isn’t there. One of her opponents still has bullets in his that he hasn’t used; he was more careful than the others, not willing to risk hitting a comrade in the crossfire. It’s a real concern; one of the thugs is already down, a shot through one of her shoulders and the other arm hanging limp at her side from a well-aimed kick.

Unfortunately, that was about the only part of this that went Kate’s way. She definitely has a concussion after that hit. They didn’t miss every shot; she can feel a bruise purpling on her back underneath the armor and there’s definitely something lodged in her hip. The woman on the floor got a slash of her knife in before her other shoulder got taken out; Kate’s side burns from what she desperately hopes is just a graze but is bleeding too much for optimism. The room is small and cramped with furniture, which is wonderful for keeping them from riddling her with bullets, but it also leaves her with no fucking room to maneuver, and no escape route. It’s two in the morning and she woke up at sunrise to the loudest goddamn bird in the world yelling outside her bedroom window.

She’s tired, and she’s slow. She probably shouldn’t have even come out tonight, but she’d heard…

“You ain’t him.”

Kate shakes herself, glaring through her mask. Her eyes flicker to the man with the working gun, and she thinks:  _ fuck it. _

Three left. She lunges towards the nearest thug; her injuries scream at the effort, but she catches them by surprise. An elbow to the throat, the heel of a hand to the nose, a satisfying crunch and a bitter spray of blood.

Two left. She sidesteps the big one’s first swing, but she sidesteps it right into a table. The woman on the floor still has some fight left in her (three left,  _ three left _ ) despite her injuries; both arms may be useless, but she lashes out with her foot and Kate, critically, stumbles.

She’s down in an instant, slammed into the table hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs, send a searing arc of pain through the wound in her side. The world lurches sickly as the back of her skull hits the table. She can move, but it’s not  _ enough,  _ and someone’s hands close around her throat while she’s too stunned to deflect them.

Kate chokes, spluttering. There’s no finesse to the hold, just brute force holding her airway shut, any pressure to her arteries purely tangential. Sparks dance in front of her eyes anyway, her lungs screaming, shimmering oil-black spots swarming her peripheral vision. One of the bastards says something, but she can’t make out the words.

She’s so tired. She’s so tired, but if she’s going to give up, it’s not going to be like this.

No one’s pinning her down yet but the one trying to strangle her, but she can see the shape of the gunman making his way behind her table, jamming his pistol under his waistband to free up both hands. Kate doesn’t know if the delay in restraining her is because no one thought far enough ahead or because he couldn’t get in position quickly enough with all the shit in the way, but she’s not going to complain. She tucks her chin down as much as she can, twisting to the side and stretching an arm up for leverage in one movement. She’s thinking of the gun, and failing that, she thinks she saw a bottle on this table that hadn’t gotten knocked down yet—

Her fingers catch on a pistol grip. Kate snatches it, rolling onto her side and snapping her elbow down. The big guy’s hands loosen at the movement and release altogether at the impact; she takes a gulping breath and kicks out, shoving him bodily away from her. It’s been years since she served (or  _ almost  _ served), but the training is bone-deep, just another layer on top of everything her dad taught her, every self-defense class she ever took.

She doesn’t think, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t make a decision. It doesn’t mean she’s not content with it, in that moment and in the moments after.

Kate pushes herself forward, back onto her feet; she raises the gun and fires  _ (one-two, always confirm)  _ perfect holes through his chest.

Her ears are ringing too hard to hear anything in detail, but she’s fairly certain that the soon-to-be corpse hitting the ground is the only sound in the room. She turns on the erstwhile gunman, fully ready to continue the fight, but he isn’t; he’s just standing there, nerveless, watching his buddy wheeze and gurgle himself to death. And then he’s watching  _ her,  _ the blood drained from his face. She remembers that look on the faces of her unwanted companions when she was falling down drunk in that alleyway, when the Bat had swooped down from the sky like a vengeful beast but left them all breathing.

“Your friend was right,” she says, flicking the gun’s safety on. With even, practiced movements, she releases the magazine, pulls the slide back to catch a cartridge in her hand. “I’m not him.”

She’s not stupid enough to take the gun, and she’s  _ definitely  _ not stupid enough to leave the whole thing with these people. Kate puts the pistol on the table, slipping the ammunition into a pouch on her belt. The last one left standing doesn’t make a move, barely even blinks.

“You should probably call an ambulance before they both bleed out,” she tells him, voice flat. Now that the adrenaline is starting to peter out, the pain is starting to really hit, but she doesn’t let herself limp until she’s out of sight.

* * *

**_now._ **

Diana stays for dinner at Bruce and Alfred’s insistence, and then all three of them turn on Kate too. It’s… it’s okay. It’s not as tense as she was afraid it would be after the last half a dozen times she and Bruce were in the same room.

She would have thought that it was because of Alfred expertly guiding the interaction, or because of the way Diana simply seems to be, but that’s not it. Maybe it’s part of it, but it’s also Bruce. The differences she thought she saw back at the manor stick around; he seems lighter somehow. Better.

It’s not like him to seem genuinely happy. (Is that even fair of her to think?) Definitely not around  _ her, _ not anymore, and Kate’s not upset about that but it does leave her feeling like she’s just walked into the epilogue of a story she didn’t even know was beginning, but everyone is acting like she’s been there the whole time.

(“She’s one of us,” Bruce says, after Diana hesitates mid-story. “She knows everything.”)

* * *

**_then._ **

Kate drags herself to a safe corner of the city, hunkers down in an abandoned duplex and starts to laboriously change back into her street clothes. She stitches the knife wound closed, her fingers shaking on the needle from exhaustion. Her hip—

Her hip can’t be helped right now. She needs better light for that, and a cleaner room, and possibly someone else to wrangle any bullet fragments out of her. Batman has an uneasy truce with the police, but Kate only interacts with them outside of the mask, and even then…

She barely knows Renee, as far as these things go. You don’t go on two dates with someone and then show up at their door in the dead of night with a gunshot wound you won’t explain.

Well. Maybe Bruce does, but he’s clearly got some kind of support system already or his suit wouldn’t look the way that it does. Maybe if he’d felt like sharing it instead of dismissing her offhand—

(She’s going to have to explain this to someone eventually. The slice across her ribs can be explained away by almost anything, she can keep her neck covered for a couple of weeks or blame a failed mugging attempt, but there are only so many things that look like a bullet hole. Even one like this.)

Just another thing to deal with later. Kate ties off her rudimentary stitches, snapping the thread off. The vest isn’t as bulletproof as she wants it to be anymore; she’ll find a dumpster for it somewhere, but the rest of the suit goes in the backpack she’d hidden her clothes in. She heaves herself to her feet and sets off home.

By the time she fumbles her door open, the bleeding has stopped. Her throat is stiff and sore, red-purple blotches spreading over her skin like a parody of wings.

She turns the light on. Batman is already there, waiting for her.

For a few seconds, she stares numbly at him, unsure of what to do or even if the concussion was worse than she thought and she’s just started hallucinating. He looks angry, but he always looks angry in that thing, so—

“Katherine,” he says. “I’m taking you in.”

Disbelief—then, abruptly, fury. Kate scoffs and doesn’t let herself lean against the wall as she closes the door behind herself.  _ “Katherine,”  _ she repeats incredulously. “Don’t give me that shit, Bruce.”

He doesn’t flinch, exactly—but he can’t hide his expression from her. They’ve known each other since they were kids.

He doesn’t say anything, and she hates him. “I can recognize my own  _ cousin,”  _ she says, barely hissing it out in a whisper, because she doesn’t hate him enough to put him in danger from her voice carrying too far. Yet. “What kind of idiot do you think I am?”

Bruce bites his tongue to collect himself before he replies. “You killed someone, Kate,” he says. “You could have—”

“You were there, then?” she interrupts. “Thanks for the backup.”

“I found the survivors,” he snaps. “You could have—”

“I did what I had to,” she says coldly. She knows she won’t win this if it comes to blows, not in the state she’s in, but that’s never stopped her before.

Besides, Kate thinks, with a grimly hysterical edge, it’s not like he’ll  _ kill  _ her.

* * *

**_now._ **

Diana left half an hour ago. Alfred vanished shortly thereafter, hopefully to sleep but most likely to just work on something else out of sight. Kate’s been following Bruce around like a ghost and she still hasn’t figured out how the hell to  _ talk  _ to him properly, or if there’s even any need to.

(There’s a need to. She knows there is. It’s just—they’ve both always been like this and she doesn’t know how to stop it when it matters.)

Bruce does something to a bookshelf and it pulls away from the wall—because the Gothic melodrama in him can’t be pried out with the mere destruction of the architecturally appropriate manor, apparently—and Kate knows that it’s not something that people are supposed to  _ see, _ and she just blurts out the first thing that comes to mind.

“I didn’t see your message in time.” She shifts her weight. “I was going to try and help back here, but…”

But by the time she even got back in town, Bruce and the new team had already left, and so had all of the parademons. There wasn’t much else to be done after that but wait.

Bruce looks back at her. He opens his mouth, but hesitates. “You didn’t have to do anything,” he says. He chuckles softly, self-deprecating. “Frankly, I didn’t think you would even read it.” He leans back against the side of the open bookcase, rubbing a hand over his jaw.

She doesn’t even know which one of them she’s taking pity on. “We both fucked up,” Kate says. “Can we just… forget the rest?”

Bruce watches her in silence for a second. “If you want to make it that easy on me,” he says, but he at least seems to understand that she doesn’t want to talk about it any more than she has to. “I need to show you something,” he says.

* * *

**_then._ **

Kate tries not to keep track of him. It’s not hard when she won’t enter the city until she runs out of reasons to avoid it.

His first sidekick leaves him, goes off to become a cop instead. His second—

Anyway. They don’t speak. Kate went through five phone numbers since the last time they talked—or, rather, the last time he stood there in stony silence while Alfred picked bullet fragments out of her and then put her on a plane. She’s sure Bruce has gone through twice that number. She’s moved three times, when she’s bothered to stay in one spot in the first place. She only comes back at all to see the memorial and then leave.

(She hasn’t spoken to anyone from West Point since her expulsion. Somehow, that didn’t make recognizing some of the names on the list of the dead any easier.)

Bruce left a message at her hotel room before she even arrived.  _ “Kate, it’s me. I have to ask you something. Meet me at the memorial at noon tomorrow?” _

At least it pretends to sound like a question. He never was much of one for asking  _ politely,  _ but she was going there anyway. Besides, she has to admit she’s curious about what the hell he could possibly want.

Kate shows up at eleven. The weather is fit for a funeral, the sun almost completely blocked out by dark grey clouds that can’t quite decide whether they want to start raining or not. It’s just barely too chilly to be comfortable, but not quite cold enough to warrant another layer. The sidewalk is just slightly slippery from the hours-long drizzle as she makes her way up the wide concrete steps, through the statue’s shadow and up to the nearest column of names.

She doesn’t recognize these ones, isn’t exactly sure how they’re organized. She reads them anyway, because they deserve that much. Her to-go cup of tea burns her lip when she tries drinking from it.

Minutes pass. Kate has moved two columns down by the time a figure silently walks up to stand beside her. She doesn’t need to look to know who it is. She doesn’t particularly need to acknowledge him, either.

“You were right,” Bruce says finally. He sounds like the words physically pain him.

They probably do. “About what?”

“Self-defense.”

Kate turns her head to look at him, brow furrowed. Bruce is looking straight ahead at the column, his expression flat, eyes tired. She can’t tell if he’s focusing on a particular name or if he’s just switched off with his eyes pointing at one. “Hell of a change of heart,” she says suspiciously.

Bruce looks hollow. “I was on the ground when this happened,” he says, nodding at the section of memorial he’s watching. “He didn’t do enough. He didn’t even  _ try—” _ His voice cracks.

Kate looks away. The hair on the back of her neck prickles. “It looked like he had his hands full,” she offers as neutrally as she can.

“He can’t afford to.” Bruce’s voice drops to almost a whisper, like he’s worried about eavesdroppers. (Or surveillance, which begs the question why he’s doing this here at all.) “You know  _ part  _ of what he can do, Kate. And he didn’t use that to take the fight out of a goddamn city?”

She bites her tongue. “Get to the point, Bruce.”

“We need a contingency plan,” he says, as earnest as he’s ever been, and she has an awful feeling that he’s not telling her everything. “In case this happens again. Or in case  _ he  _ decides to go rogue himself.”

She doesn’t necessarily disagree. It’s not that she believes Superman is automatically their enemy because he could be, or because there’s nothing they could do to stop him if he wanted to be, but she’s never been an optimist.

She always thought that Bruce  _ was. _ There was no other explanation for sticking with the cape thing for as long as he did—or as long as he  _ has,  _ if he’s trying to recruit her into his… what?

“I gave up on vigilante justice a while ago,” she says, keeping her eyes ahead. “I thought you’d noticed.”

“You started it for a reason.”

She definitely thought she did. Oh, Kate hated him the first time she saw him in the Suit, the casual presumption of him. He swooped down out of the sky when she was handling the situation by herself, pulled her up to her feet without asking if she needed the help, but then let her shove him away and stand on her own.

_ (“I suggest you call a cab.” _

_ “I suggest you  _ **_fuck_ ** _ yourself.”) _

But it had started something, finding out what he’d been doing all this time, what happened while he was gone. There was something admirable in it, she thought. Bruce had taken his grief, his pain, and he’d driven himself with it. Kate had taken hers and… 

It was another way. It wasn’t her way, and she didn’t come up with it on her own (because really, who  _ did  _ that?), but it was a start. It was better than nothing.

“Kate.” Bruce pauses, maybe hesitates.

She sighs. “I’m not going to help you do anything drastic,” Kate says. “But if you ever figure out what you  _ specifically  _ need me for, let me know.”

(She leaves, but she does her research, finds the trail of bodies he’s left behind, just barely accidental enough for technicalities. Maybe she could talk to him, and maybe she should, but she doesn’t; it’s not like he would listen to her, and it’s not like she would have any right to lecture him on this. It’s not that she thinks killing is inherently, always immoral; it’s that  _ he  _ did, and this isn’t  _ him— _ but she knows he wouldn’t see that. So, instead, she doesn’t even bother to try.)

A month later, he calls. She doesn’t answer.

* * *

**_now._ **

This end of Bruce’s lair looks pretty much the same as the glimpse of it Kate got all those years ago: concrete and stone, dimmed industrial lighting flicking on as they make their way down the stairs. She can see glimpses of the natural cave ceiling sometimes, when the halls become less carved-out and more open, and she wonders for a moment if the system sprawls all the way back to the Manor. It doesn’t seem probable, but it’s possible, and…

Well, if she were Bruce, she wouldn’t want to start from scratch either once the old place got wrecked. Especially not if the destruction didn’t actually spread to the cave network.

Bruce doesn’t say anything past a murmured  _ this won’t take long, I promise  _ after the staircase ends. Kate can’t think of anything to say, so she lets their footsteps be the only sounds, and she tries not to feel uncomfortable with the silence.

Bruce turns a corner, taps a code into a keypad— _ why even bother locking anything in a maze with a hidden entrance? _ —and gestures her through as the concrete wall sinks into itself and retracts into the floor. A bomb shelter?

No, Kate corrects herself as she steps through. A museum.

It’s a long room, maybe four or five paces wide. On the far end, a Bat suit scowls—a new model, judging by the exposed parts, the tools lined up neatly on a wheeled table by its side. Both of the side walls are lined with coffin-sized indentations, covered in glass, softly illuminated at the top and bottom. Earlier copies of Bruce’s suit, she notes without surprise; Dick’s old costume gives her pause. Next to it, its glass panel missing as though it was recently moved, she recognizes the shape of Jason’s variant: the colors faded and oddly patchy in spots, but otherwise mostly intact. Scuffs, small holes, but meticulously clean and strangely intact. There’s a telltale mark of discoloration where a crack in the mask was fixed, subtle stitching over any fabric damage; Bruce or Alfred must have repaired it as much as they could.

Her heart dips sharply, and  _ (which one of them had to scrub the blood off?) _ she looks away. “I’m sorry I missed his funeral,” she says. Hell, she never even met the kid personally, just saw him around from a distance.

She remembers thinking, once, that he fought like he wanted to die. Or didn’t quite realize that he could.

Bruce hesitates. “I don’t… know how I would have reacted,” he says. “I wasn’t myself. For a long time.”

Kate glances back up at the mask’s eyeless stare. “No one is after something like that.”

He inhales slowly. “That’s not what I wanted to show you, though.” Bruce steps past Jason’s effigy to one of the farthest cases, crouching down to slide it open.

It doesn’t compute, at first. But she looks at it for a second, and she sees her old, terrible, patchwork imitation of a suit. The bullet holes, the gash in the side, have been repaired with as much care as anything else in the room. It looks out of place on display like this—even if it’s  _ on display  _ in a locked room inside a hidden lair—knowing where it came from. There’s nothing special about it, apart from the fact that it was hers once.

“You kept it?” she says, baffled.

Bruce shifts his weight from foot to foot. “I thought I should,” he says. “To remind me… I don’t know. But I thought I should.”

She takes a step forward as if proximity will make it make more sense. “I thought you’d have thrown it out by now.”

“Would have had to burn it,” he says. “DNA evidence. Just in case.”

Kate snorts a laugh. Bruce smiles, a little falteringly.

“I can make a better one if you want to try vigilante justice again,” he says. “With backup, this time. Arthur takes some getting used to, but I think you’d like him. And there’s Diana, obviously.”

“I don’t need you to be my wingman, Bruce,” Kate says. And it’s stupid, and they’re  _ both  _ getting too old to run around like that, but—he’s better, now. This can be better.

“Backup sounds nice,” she adds, looking back at her old vest.

* * *

**_later._ **

He remakes her suit in less time than what strictly makes sense, but she can’t say she’s surprised. And he genuinely does remake it—the material is leaps and bounds better, but the design is as close to being the same as he can get. No cowl, but a jagged, arching mask that would cover as much of her face as one. Matte black, sections of thicker armor on the breastplate over the ribcage. The razor-edged bracers are his design, but the sigil—borrowed and modified, narrower and sharper and bloody crimson—is unmistakably hers.

It feels more comfortable than it ought to.

Kate meets the fledgeling League in the wing of the Cave closest to the harbor—for Arthur’s benefit, she gathers, as he sloshes out of the moon pool. Victor throws him a towel as Kate steps into view. Arthur blinks at her for a second before foregoing the towel entirely and just wringing his hair out on the floor. “Hey,” he says. “New girl.”

“Not exactly,” she says, glancing around. She doesn’t see Bruce immediately, but her eyes do fall on Diana, who smiles like the fucking dawn.

“Welcome,” Wonder Woman says. “Bruce said you were coming.”

Kate clears her throat. “I was curious,” she says. “Alfred said he was making friends. I needed proof.”

“Hell of a getup for someone who’s just curious,” Arthur mutters, continuing to just hold the towel instead of actually using it.

Victor stands with a soft whir of machinery. He doesn’t look entirely at ease, but she doesn’t think any of them really are but Diana. “So,” he says. “Introductions?”

Kate doesn’t even get to open her mouth before she gets interrupted. She doesn’t see movement, but there’s a breeze out of nowhere. Barry skids, a blur of flannel as he stops, giving her the wide-eyed look of a bird that can’t quite figure out if it needs to be afraid or not. “Oh, there’s two of you. Um. Hello?” he says. He glances at Diana, apparently for guidance, and immediately falters. “Oh, we were dressing up for this. Okay.” He drums his fingers on his thigh slightly faster than what should be physically possible.

“Where’s Bruce?” Diana asks.

“Passed him and Clark in the hall,” Barry answers. “Uh. Superman. Are we—which names are we using here? Is the masks-on-no-names rule happening even if we’re in here, and also is she… safe? I mean, she’s also in here, but—”

“She’s one of us,” Bruce interrupts at last, striding in with Superman in his wake. “Everyone, this is Kate. Kate, this is… everyone. You’ve met Diana.”

Superman smiles at her. He has dimples, which seems like a weird thing for an overpowered alien. His handshake is brief, friendly, and—like Diana’s—doesn’t feel like it comes from someone who can pulverize concrete if he stubs his toe on it. He’s tall, but not as tall as she was expecting; and while she’s sure that he has plenty of presence when he’s out in the field, the only person in the room who looks  _ less _ intimidating is Barry. And Barry is wearing a flannel hoodie.

“Hi,” Superman says. “I’m Clark.”

Kate half-smiles, the left side of her mouth slanting. “Nice to finally meet you,” she says. “Bruce has been talking about you for a while.”

He huffs a chuckle. “Good things, I hope,” he says, and he actually sounds genuinely concerned.

“So,” Victor says. He glances over her suit, his red eye glowing. “Batwoman?” he guesses.

She thinks about it for a second. “Good as anything,” she replies.


End file.
